General Discussion

Back in high school our chem teacher had purchased an old farmstead. The main house was large and old--rebuilt after the British burned it after the Battle of Baltimore. The old slave quarters weren't burned and dated to the 1600s.

Chem teacher had gotten copies of the old records from the 1600s and 1700s and wanted to have them decoded, so my girlfriend, her best friend, and I spent time copying them over from old cursive to new cursive, having another one of us proof and correct, and then type them up. He got it declared a national heritage site of some sort, protected status--the two structures (at some point united) and the old family cemetery (not *his* family's). Wasn't hard to teach ourselves.

Then reading a reproduction of the handwritten founding documents of the US became really easy--the scribes' penmanship on the old title documents and land grants was good, but a but rushed and at times cramped. Jefferson's penmanship was superb.

Now, reading 19th century and early 20th century Russian handwriting for me, *that's* a challenge.